David McElroy

I was sitting in a restaurant tonight when I noticed a young couple at a nearby table.

They were attractive, stylish and looked like the sort of people advertisers use to sell expensive apartments and luxury vacations to upper-middle-class professionals.

But after a while, I realized something strange was happening.

For nearly the entire meal, both of them were focused on taking photographs.

Not casual snapshots. Elaborate productions.

They adjusted lighting. They moved glasses and silverware around on the table. They repositioned plates after the food arrived. They took photographs individually. They took photographs together. They checked the pictures carefully, rejected most of them and started over repeatedly.

Then came the strange part.

The moment they were ready to take the actual photographs of themselves together, both of them suddenly transformed.

They leaned toward each other warmly. Their faces became animated. They smiled with what appeared to be genuine joy and affection. For a few seconds, they looked like one of those impossibly happy couples social media influencers are always pretending to be.

Then the photographs were finished. And the expressions disappeared instantly.

Not gradually. Instantly.

It was like watching actors step out of character after a director yelled “cut.”

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Lauren is a university professor. We met several years ago and she immediately impressed me. She was intelligent, thoughtful and highly accomplished. She came across as serious and rational.

One day, she started talking to me about Taylor Swift.

I assumed she simply liked the music. Millions of people do. There wouldn’t have been anything unusual about that. But the longer she talked, the stranger the conversation began to feel.

She told me about traveling to concerts. She talked about exchanging “friendship bracelets” with strangers she’d never met before. She described the emotional connection fans felt with each other — and with Swift herself — in ways that sounded as though she was talking about a guru or messiah.

These weren’t simply people attending concerts for entertainment. They were devotees gathering with other devotees who believed they were participating in something meaningful together. They seemed to believe they had discovered some important truth.

What fascinated me most was the intensity of it. I’ve known religious converts who spoke with less passion. And this woman wasn’t unusual.

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A woman I’ve known for years sent me a message a few years back — and it’s on my mind again tonight.

It wasn’t flirtatious. In fact, that was what made it feel so strangely heavy.

She wasn’t trying to begin anything romantic. She wasn’t hinting that she wanted an affair or that she was hoping to leave her husband. She made that very clear from the beginning. Instead, she simply wanted me to know something that had slowly dawned on her over the years.

She said she had misunderstood what kind of person she actually needed as a partner. She had thought the man she married represented the things that mattered to her. It turned out that I represented what really mattered to her. She just hadn’t known that back then.

We had known each other online for a long time and had met in person a couple of times. Nothing romantic ever developed. There was no dramatic split or unresolved tension. We had simply moved in different directions.

She eventually married another man. From the outside, her life appeared stable and successful. I rarely heard from her anymore. Then I got that long message one evening explaining that she had been quietly unhappy in her marriage almost from the beginning.

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